


Entirely Covered in Your Invisible Name

by wordstrings



Series: The Paradox Series [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Altered Mental States, BAMF!John, Blood, Codependency, Demisexuality, Depression, Drug Use, Dubious Ethics, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Morbid, POV First Person, Possessive Behavior, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Romance, Slash, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 01:25:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstrings/pseuds/wordstrings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock solves crimes, loses himself, comes back again, and all the while John prays that he never comes to his senses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entirely Covered in Your Invisible Name

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Cały pokryty twoim niewidzialnym imieniem](https://archiveofourown.org/works/695199) by [Pirania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pirania/pseuds/Pirania)



 

  
John is reasonably sure that one of these days, Sherlock is going to come to his senses.   
  
Oh, he won't be any saner, that goes without saying--but eventually, John will cease to be the center of this maddening, bizarre, frantically gorgeous lunatic's universe.  He doesn't like to think about it.  But it seems inevitable.  
  
Not that John is in any way insecure about his own charms.  He may not be a genius, but he's very smart, made it through uni and frankly harrowing advanced physical chemistry and then the Army's special training, and he can do the Friday crosswords.  He may not be handsome, but he's affable and doesn't ever think himself ugly.  He's short, but he can kill a man from very, very far away.  He certainly isn't fashionable, but he's neat and he's clean.  His temper can be thin, granted, but he listens very well indeed and he's masterful at understanding the people he's listening to.  He's scarred, but he's also brave.  So that's something.  
  
But none of that really explains Sherlock.  Nor what seems to be best termed Sherlock's...obsession.  
  
The point really comes home to him on Thursday afternoon at around five o'clock, in a gay bar in the East End, in pursuit of a suspect.  
  
Sherlock Holmes, John has realized, is _never_ going to stop alarming him.  Never.  He keeps coming up with new ways of doing it, and then pretending that whatever he did just then wasn't a bit outside normal parameters.  For instance, just now he is shamming at being gay.  He's leaning on the bar with one angular wrist, having undone an extra button on his white-on-white striped designer shirt, brushing the hair from the back of his neck and touching his collar every so often with his impossible fingers, flirting with an archaeologist who knows where his neighbour keeps her spare set of flat keys.  Sherlock wants the flat keys.  The archaeologist wants Sherlock.  
  
John wants another drink.  And to quit getting wildly possessive urges that make him feel like a fourth former.  
  
The archaeologist is tall, with close-cropped blond hair and very blue eyes, and his clothes are effortlessly rumpled, and he's clearly very muscular underneath them.  No one in the bar is ogling the archaeologist, however.  They are ogling Sherlock, who just took a shot of vodka and then licked his lips and then drew the back of one finger over his lower one.  The miraculous one, the one that's both round and squared-off at once.  Then Sherlock smiles, and nips the same lip with one upper tooth for exactly half a second.  John wonders if it would make any difference to the archaeologist to know that Sherlock isn't a bit like that, that he's better and madder and darker and stiller and sharper, or if the archaeologist would take him to bed anyway.  He'd bet a fiver the chap wouldn't give a damn.  Just _look_ at Sherlock.  Christ.  
  
In this light, the man's cheekbones are mathematically absurd.  They ought to be feminine, first of all.  And second, they ought to be harsh.  They're neither.  
  
 _Jesus Christ._  
  
Now Sherlock has turned round with both elbows on the bar and is leaning back so prettily and so sensually--no, strike that, _sexually_ \--that every man in the place with a clear view is probably at half-mast.  Too much of his alabaster chest is visible.  He's made his eyes glow silver somehow, as if he owns some sort of inner backup generator.  John has never seen him lounge with his pelvis so far forward, and that isn't even the worst of it.  He's batting his eyelashes.  His _eyelashes._   No one on earth has ever been gayer, and Sherlock isn't even-- _is_ Sherlock gay?  
  
 _I'm losing my mind,_ John thinks.  _He was inside me eight hours ago._  
  
Sherlock puts his hand on the blond man's forearm, gripping it, and the other man's palm slides very naturally over Sherlock's waist.  John looks away because if he doesn't, he'll ruin Sherlock's performance.  Possibly by getting into a serious ruck.  Sherlock would never let him live that down, and after all there are much worse things happening in this very bar at this very moment.  So long as he's not looking, he can wait out the blind rage.  Must do, because he doesn't want to make things awkward for Sherlock by murdering a stranger in a gay pub.  It would make for an embarrassing time with Lestrade.  
  
John knows the instant Sherlock learns where the flat keys are, because he thanks the archaeologist for the shot, winks at him, and dives for the rear door.  Walking normally now, like an elegant bullet train screaming out of a station.  John follows.  They end up in an alley just back of the kitchens, everything smelling of fry oil.  A ginger cat stares at them from within a little cardboard box and growls.  
  
"You're not even gay, are you?" John marvels.  
  
"Hmm?"  Sherlock is texting.  Of course he is.  His fingers are moving at lightning speed, his eyes riveted.  John reaches out, does up his shirt to the usual standard.  He feels instantly better.  
  
"Queer.  _Are_ you gay?"  
  
"Not exactly," his boyfriend owns.  "Dreadful nuisance this, there's a front desk with an attendant, only one lift, staircase entrance in the foyer, we'd be seen trying to get to her spare set.  I'm going to have to get in through the window."  
  
"It's eleven flights up."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Sherlock."  
  
"A window-washing service."  
  
"Sorry?"  
  
"Who I'm texting, a window-washing service, he owes me a favour, I got his brother out of gaol six months--"  
  
"No, no, _no,_ Sherlock, back up a bit.  When you say you're not _exactly_ gay--"  
  
"Neither are you," Sherlock points out mildly.  
  
"So, you...right, then.  You do sleep with women."  
  
"Not once."  
  
Sherlock sends his text.  He stops, slides the phone in his jacket pocket, and stares at John.  He crosses his arms, narrows his eyes a bit, focused and yet completely neutral.  Trying to work out just what on earth has John in a strop this time.  
  
"You've never shagged a woman, but you're not exactly gay."  
  
"Right.  Not exactly gay.  Same as you."  
  
"Nope, sorry, I've shagged plenty of women, on three continents in fact, and am simply bisexual."  
  
"Asia, Europe, North America," Sherlock deduces placidly.  "I never slept with any women, but that might be by accident, I haven't the data, I might have done.  Who can say?  I hardly fancied anyone enough to bother, and all of them were men."  
  
"Yes, but you weren't--I mean to say, you...hang it."  
  
Sherlock thinks this over.  
  
"You want to tell me that I wasn't attracted to them because of their direct biology.  Only who they were.  That's true.  Take Charles, for instance, I didn't sleep with him merely because he's a _man_."  
  
"Right.  Yes, right, that _is_ what I mean.  Sorry, Charles?"  
  
"The bloke I was chatting up just now, Charles.  I didn't have sex with him because of his gender, exactly.  I liked him."  
  
This effectively sends the conversation veering along another track.  Now John is actually angry.  Before, he was just angry in principle and in theory.  But now...now it's in earnest and in fact.  
  
"That fellow you were just shamming gay over, flirting with, you've...you've...that's your ex."  
  
"One of them.  Why?"  
  
If it were any man other than Sherlock--literally any man in the world--John would have punched him right in the jaw.  Instead, John turns deliberately around, so as not to see Sherlock cocking an eyebrow at him.  He looks at the brick wall, grimy with dirt and spray paint, right before his nose.  After a minute's contemplation, he drops his head into the building.  
  
"Hey, hey, easy," Sherlock says, sounding more annoyed than alarmed.  "I never--"  
  
"Thought I might be troubled by it," John says to the bricks, vaguely disgusted and more than a little put out.  "That bit--though you're a genius--never occurred to you.  That I might object."  
  
"But why on earth _should_ you?  I need keys.  Needed keys, we'll go another way about it now.  Window washers."  
  
John pounds his head into the wall just once.  It doesn't hurt, but it's going to arrest Sherlock's attention.  John himself isn't dramatic.  But he does speak Sherlock's version of English and his version of body language and his version of silence.  And those languages are very dramatic indeed.  It works, very quickly.  Sherlock grips John by both his shoulders, fisting his hands into John's dark plaid shirt, and turns him round.  John's back hits red brick, and that's something.  A very small victory, but a triumph nevertheless.  
  
"Stop doing that," Sherlock says ominously.  
  
"Okay.  Did it cross your mind I might not like you throwing yourself at an...an ex?"  
  
Sherlock makes the scoffing sound which means John is being dense.  "But he's just a bit of data."  
  
" _A bit of--_ you're off your head, completely.  He's very, very, very fit, Sherlock."  
  
"Dull."  
  
"And well spoken."  
  
"Boring."  
  
"Sherlock, he goes round the world for a bloody living!"  
  
"Charles could go round the mulberry bush for all I care, he's still tedious."  
  
"Your nursery rhyme references are always disturbing, I want you to know."  
  
Breathing a little quicker, swiftly growing worried, Sherlock absorbs this critique.  But judging from the line between those eyebrows, just below where his black hair sweeps down to one side, he still hasn't caught on yet.  
  
"Look, here we are," John offers, "I'd my tonsils out when I was a lad.  Before that, I loved strawberry ice cream.  Couldn't get enough of the stuff.  But then my throat was sore.  I had it...well, every day, Mum felt sorry for me, so there you are.  She let me have bits of it whenever I couldn't eat much else.  At first, it was grand.  But then, everything changed.  I got sick of it.  Never wanted to see it again.  Wretched business, strawberry ice cream, but it's my own fault I don't care for it, I was the one gorged on the stuff.  So you see, you'll grow tired of this.  One day.  Being with a..."  John clears his throat loudly.  "It's not that I'm not good now, but you're.  Overdoing it.  I think.  You'll wear me out.  For yourself, I mean to say, because I'm fine, never felt better, but you--you'll lose this sort of.  Keen interest you...have.  Sherlock, what, I...what's wrong?"  
  
"You've had your tonsils out?"   
  
Sherlock sounds heartbroken.  Devastated, as if John just confessed he'd also shagged Charles the Archaeologist, and ten minutes ago.  
  
"Why didn't you _tell_ me?" Sherlock pleads.  
  
"No," John says flatly.  "No, no, no, no.  No, you lunatic.  You will not change the subject.  You were shamming _gay_ for that man.  Right in front of me.  He touched you."  
  
"What else don't you have?  Other than tonsils, I thought you had tonsils.  Tell me."  
  
"He was one of the tidiest blokes I've ever seen."  
  
"He was an _experiment._ "  
  
"Oh my god," John breathes, horrified.  "What sort?"  
  
"The normal sort!  Everyone else gets to have experiments!" Sherlock explodes with all the petulance of a three-year-old child.  "It's completely unfair!  Everyone else, _everyone_ , John, sleeps with people as an experiment, in order to determine whether or not those two people fit.  It's normal to have experiments, try people on for size and see if you like them, you can't pretend I'm different just because--and oh, no, I'm _sorry,_ don't let me _forget,_ some people also shag other people simply because they want to, and don't give a damn about anyone else's feelings.  But that's fine, it's all fine, everything's fine, just so long as Sherlock Holmes confines himself either to tender endearments or else a wank every few weeks, just because my feelings aren't like...because I'm...  Piss off."  
  
"Did you sham gay for him the whole time?" John snaps.  "Or were you...you?  The way you are.  Come on.  How long can you go, playing at--"  
  
"As much as two weeks, and _yes_ , I was--"  
  
"So that was why you had to sham it again, keep your bloody story straight, I can't _believe_ \--"  
  
"Everyone shams at things!  Why does this make you angry?" Sherlock asks desperately.  "This is insane, it can't matter.  It _can't._ "  
  
"Why can't it, then?"  
  
"Because the point is logically moot, as I'm never having it off with anyone else ever again.  I'm not _straight_ , I'm not _gay_ , I'm _with you._   How do I get it through that skull of yours?  I'm...John-sexual.  Oh, bloody hell, you're _mine,_ you said I could have you, you _did._   You promised."  
  
"I did, right," John recalls.  "Christ.  That's mad, isn't it?  Property of Sherlock Holmes."  
  
That phrase provokes a little growl, as if it's just about the best thing Sherlock has ever heard.  The part that John doesn't understand precisely is _why_ this is so, why the detective should be completely preoccupied by him.  But it's difficult to think very clearly about it when it feels as if Sherlock Holmes is going to insert himself inside your ribcage simply by kissing you.  The far taller man's tongue is everywhere, and his hands are both on John's throat now, with his thumbs pressing into the spaces around his larynx, and his fingers pushing in the softer flesh under his jaw, and John wonders idly whether Sherlock is about to prefer a dead taxidermied John to a live breathing John.  Because it's not impossible.  But then he recalls something and he starts to laugh.  
  
"You can't _taste_ that I don't have tonsils," he points out fondly.  
  
"Idiot.  Of course I can."  
  
"You really can't, though."  
  
"I can try."  
  
Sherlock does try.  For at least two more minutes, equally using his fingers.  It's breathtaking, and comprehensive, and all-consuming.  Yes, _consuming_.  That would be the right word for this particular round of snogging in a public alley.  Then John hears a little chime, and the phone in Sherlock's jacket vibrates against both of their chests.  
  
It's in Sherlock's hand half a second later.  His dark hair is even more mussed than usual, and now his lips are flushing slightly.  Sherlock is texting, so John gets to stare while he gets his breath back a little.  _This is not like the strawberry ice cream,_ John thinks, _the staring at Sherlock Holmes.  It's not.  It's more like a heroin habit, or breathing in and out.  What a bloody mess I've gotten myself into._  
  
John thinks of Charles the Archaeologist and feels rather smug.  
  
"Yes!" Sherlock exclaims.  One of his fists flies into the air in boyish triumph.  "Yes, yes, yes.  Brilliant.  I am brilliant."  
  
"You are," John agrees.  
  
"We're going to wash a window on the eleventh floor."  
  
"Lead on, then."  
  
After the window washing, and the break-in, and the stealing of a laptop, and the daring escape out the window again with the evidence for Lestrade, and the hacking into protected financial records, they are ready to return home, and none the worse for wear.  John likes that for a change, they get themselves into enough scrapes.  But today went really well, what with the initial deductions and then Sherlock getting to be a window washer, which he liked, and John can't help but be in a good mood anyway now.  He's had an idea.  
  
"You need to eat something," he reminds Sherlock.  "There's good Cantonese near here.  That manager woman whose sister you cleared of smuggling charges?"  
  
Sherlock makes an indulgent humming sound and links his hand into John's elbow.  
  
"After dinner," John says slowly, "I wonder if you might do me a favour."  
  
One of Sherlock's eyebrows quirks up.  
  
"Can you sham gay at home?"  
  
He frowns.  
  
"With the blue robe on?" John adds.  
  
"If you mean, am I capable of acting like a nancy in our flat, yes of course, but--"  
  
"With the blue robe on and nothing else.  It's an experiment," John says seductively.  
  
"Oh.  _Oh,_ " he breathes, getting the picture a bit better.  He thinks it over, smiling softly.  "Won't you be angry?"  
  
"No," John promises, "not for an experiment."  
  
"Right, then.  Yes, if you want.  But I'm not certain you'll like it."  
  
"Did Charles like it?"  
  
"Yes.  I'm very good at it."  
  
"Did you like it too?"  
  
"Yes.  Before I got bored and had to go back to being me.  It was the _me_ that was the problem."  
  
"Well, it's just an experiment.  But so long as _you're_ enjoying it too, I'll like it."  
  
"If you say so," Sherlock shrugs, setting off.  "You're going to have to top, though, sorry, nothing to be done about it, I can't keep it going otherwise, it's too much for me, dreadful things happen.  I'm not hungry, but if you want Cantonese, it's this way."  
  
It takes a moment for John's feet to work well enough to follow after.  But he's very good at recovering.   
  
Later, it's a wrench to decide whether to take Sherlock--who certainly seems to be enjoying this particular experiment, and actually thumbed a bit of jam onto John's jaw so as to lick it off again in their tiled kitchen--to bed, so as to make slow, delicious love to him; or else to throw him against the wallpaper and wipe the sweet little smirk from his face.  But Sherlock is much too tall for that, though John is fast losing his patience.  He's hard enough to see stars, as a matter of fact, and he has more than ample evidence that his friend isn't keen to wait much longer either.  After all, Sherlock was the one who clambered onto the only clean part of their kitchen table with his long legs gently swinging and his knob just visible, smiling whimsically with his head cocked, and now he's wrapped both legs around John's naked waist while John kisses him senseless.  _Yes, as happy as either of the first options are_ , John thinks as he traces Sherlock's pectorals with his nails, _best to go with instincts._ And quickly.  Sherlock has his head bent down and is moaning softly into John's mouth, and it's glorious, but John still has a crick in his neck.   
  
"Don't you want me yet?  I'm good, I promise I'll be so good.  You're making me dizzy," croons the baritone, about an eighth above his normal speaking voice.  
  
Of course this Sherlock has a supremely healthy ego too, it occurs to John.  Whoever this Sherlock is.  And wherever he came from.  
  
" _I'm_ making _you_ dizzy?" John laughs, his hands drifting around inside the sheet of blue fabric, skimming porcelain skin.  
  
"God, of course you are.  I've never felt like this, I want to tell you everything."  
  
"I...really?  What sorts of things?"  
  
"When I touch myself, I picture you.  That you're in me, and it's so good I can't even breathe."  
  
That does it.  Really, that bloody well does it.  John's self-control is not boundless, and so he pulls Sherlock off the kitchen table.  At first blush, it seems best just to turn him round and bend him over, but their kitchen table is nothing if not dangerously unsanitary.  So John swiftly maneuvers his friend flat on his stomach on their much-abused Thinking Sofa and slides the blue silken robe to one side very slowly and climbs up on his knees, hands very steady and breath very quick.  
  
"You _are_ enjoying this, aren't you?" he murmurs against the detective's ivory ear.   
  
"Silly little darling."  It's isn't Sherlock's voice at all, it's much softer, but there he really is in the wink John receives from the upward-tilted side of his face.  It's one of the oddest things John has ever seen, but somehow it makes him all the harder.  As if that were possible.  
  
John mouths at the detective's spine, his heartbeat gone all ragged.  "Do you have any idea how _beautiful_ you are?"  
  
 _The real him_ , John thinks, _would say 'yes, I am well aware of the fact.'  The bloody prick._  
  
"I wish you'd show me, please show me, please, I can't wait any longer," begs the other Sherlock, shivering as John's already slick fingers trail past his spine and down.  
  
John thinks, as he sinks his fingers in and Sherlock gasps like a born tart, that Charles the Archaeologist--whatever Sherlock subjected him to--is a very, very, very stupid git.  
  
If not for military training, it would be over the moment it begins.  But John grits his teeth and thinks about safety manuals and cold clinic examination rooms and how to perform gallbladder surgery and waits out the most dangerous part.  When he safely can, he buries his face in the white shoulderblades with the silk falling off of them and sighs gratefully.  
  
"God, love, I _said_ please," coaxes the trembling, sublime not-quite-Sherlock underneath him.  
  
"Say it again, then," John growls out.  
  
Sherlock, of course, does him one better.  Naturally.  He _is_ a genius, even if at the moment he's pretending to be a society slag.  
  
"Please fuck me, I want you to so much, don't you want to?  _Please._ "  
  
"God, you're a bloody health hazard," John groans, twitching his hips hard.  "You're a menace.  There ought to be a medical caution on you, _signs_ , some sort of warning device, you're _incredible_."  
  
His friend grins, eyes shut, and it's the real one.  Not the Normal People Smile and not the recently discovered Flirty Gay Smile.  Apparently the bizarre savant is very touched at being called a health hazard, because this is just Sherlock, being darkly delighted with himself.  So John doesn't feel a bit guilty when he thrusts it right off his face again, as Sherlock's hands scrabble for a hold on the sofa cushions and his eyelids flutter madly.  
  
John loses himself in the world that is Sherlock very quickly after that.  He's made love to men before in plenty of ways, but he wasn't in love with them.  He's rodgered a man this tall once, but that fellow didn't make sounds like a baby tiger cub purring.  He's been in love before, but never obsessed.  And he had better take it while he can get it, he thinks with something close to despair as he reaches the edge and Sherlock suddenly shudders facefirst into the sofa completely untouched.  Because this man is a miracle and John is ordinary.   
  
And one of these days, Sherlock will come to his senses.  
  
Sherlock is very still now.  He looks asleep, but he isn't.  Carefully, his heart pounding, John pulls away and slips behind him on the sofa.  It's a bit of a mess, but he can't be bothered to care.  He pulls his friend round so his head is in John's neck and John can smell all the dark secrets in his hair.  He wraps the blue robe over both of them and then wraps his arms tight around Sherlock's slim back.  
  
"Tell me I'm beautiful again," comes a lazy voice in his ear.  
  
"Hey, quit that," John whispers, tightening his grip.   
  
"Why?"  
  
"I want _you_ back.  This was an experiment.  I'm with a genius vampire consulting detective who fancies himself a sociopath.  Come back."  
  
Sherlock pauses.  "But I wasn't shamming."  
  
John winces, then smiles.  It is his real voice, of course, just gone soft and mellow from a rare stint at submissive sex.  
  
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, including crime scenes.  You're...the only thing worth looking at.  You are dangerously lovely.  And incredibly vain."  
  
Sherlock sighs contentedly and snuggles closer.  John suddenly misses him terribly, misses the too-bright wild creature without manners whose idea of Eden is covered in blood.  What has he done to him?  What if he never returns?  What if this was all a terrible mistake, and now John is stuck with a charming and otherworldly queer instead of an infuriating John-sexual tosser with a brain like a razor blade?  
  
"Say something for me back.  Something very _Sherlock_ ," he requests, fighting hard not to be frightened.  
  
Sherlock drags a fingertip along John's pelvis.  "You haven't any appendicitis scars, so as far as I can deduce, all you're missing are tonsils.  But I do need to know if my conclusions are accurate.  It's imperative."  
  
John's breath slides out of him in relief.  "Just the tonsils.  Is that important for when you finally have me for a fry-up?"  
  
"Mmm.  No.  Something else."  
  
John laughs.  Sherlock is back, and he's wonderful.  He's better like this, John concludes.  That was a very successful experiment, as experiments go, but people can't help who they love, can they?  
  
"When you said dreadful things happen, what did you do to Charles the Archaeologist?" he asks with his lips against Sherlock's forehead.  
  
"I can't tell you."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"It's...not fine."  
  
"Sorry?"  
  
"There are a pair of lists," Sherlock explains, still sounding in a complete and utter haze.  John wonders if this is what it's always like afterward for him, or if the fact it was John this time had something to do with it, because he's talking like he's been sedated.  "Fine and Not Fine.  I didn't call them that before I met you, but there were always...categories of items.  I only fancied him, it was different, so the lists were very short.  Three items apiece."  
  
This isn't making much sense.  "You don't fancy me?"  
  
"No," he says, smiling.  "That's not quite the proper English."  
  
"So there are lists.  I think you've hinted at this.  Right.  I can manage, I'm game."  
  
"No, you can't."  
  
"Shall I fear for my life in earnest, then?  What did you do?"  
  
"I told you.  I got bored.  I was me."  
  
"But it's _you_ that I--"  
  
"There was a very valuable long piece of petrified wood he'd unearthed somewhere, a totem of some kind, quite smooth, maybe an ancient fertility idol, I don't know, I've deleted it, but he loved the thing, and it was ridiculous, he bragged more about finding it when he was in pubs than he did about finding _me_.  Hundreds and hundreds of years old, though, and apparently very valuable to scholars, not to mention in the fiscal sense, so he objected when he discovered I'd used it on him the night before."  
  
John is laughing so hard that the man in his arms suddenly seems rather heavy.  And Sherlock is quite compact, but not generally _heavy._ John's chest is shaking, however, and that makes him seem denser than he is.  
  
"You rodgered someone with a priceless antique because he gave it more compliments than you?"  
  
"I told you.  Not.  Fine.  Try to keep up."  
  
It might not be fine, but it's very funny nevertheless.  John's breathing calms.  He chuckles again, once, and then kisses his friend's hair.  
  
"How many items are on my lists?  Fine and Not Fine?"  
  
"Thirty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively."  
  
"Bloody hell," John says, shocked.   
  
"Forget I said that," Sherlock requests drunkenly.  He's really very far from his usual self at the moment.  "Delete it."  
  
John thinks about telling Sherlock he's not capable of "deleting" things from his brain, but is suddenly very sleepy.  And that's not really what he wants to tell Sherlock, anyway.  It's not what's in his mind, what haunts him whenever he wakes up to see grey eyes peering at him as if he's a fresh corpse.  It's not what truly matters to him in this moment.  
  
"Don't ever come to your senses," he whispers to Sherlock, who is now asleep.  "Stay like this for me.  For as long as you can."  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The next morning, Sherlock hasn't come to his senses.  But neither has he fully returned to being the complete prick John rather adores, which is troubling.  Sherlock actually makes the tea, for instance.  Which is interesting, as John wasn't certain Sherlock knew how tea was produced, and there is a pot of English Breakfast on their little dining table.  John begins to worry again.  
  
He worries still more when Sherlock kisses his knuckles after John hands him his mobile.  It isn't that Sherlock fails to be affectionate generally.  On the contrary, and sometimes he's shockingly sweet, really.  But his version of affection oftenest involves things like finishing a crust of toast simply because John already ate most of it, or lightly writing his own name on John's skin with his fingernail when he thinks John is asleep (John appreciates that one much more than any reasonable human being should, he knows), or using up all the hot water specifically so that John has to bathe in water Sherlock has already used supposing he fancies a soak.  That's one of Sherlock's favourite tricks.  The Recycled Bath Water Gambit, John calls it to himself.  He ought to pitch a fit every time it happens.  He doesn't, though, to his own continual surprise.  Just like he doesn't own up to being awakened every time his friend decides he needs to trace SHERLOCK HOLMES into his skin in the middle of the night.  
  
John wonders after an hour or two of this newly sane treatment whether he ought to press a bit of hard-won advantage and bin some human remains he found in the veg drawer.  But then they get a call from Lestrade and Sherlock whirls into his coat like a hurricane and John forgets to fret about it any longer.  
  
When they arrive at the crime scene, John realizes that today is going to be extraordinarily trying.  
  
On some days, John thinks, Anderson is a wanker.  On other days, Anderson is an unbearable bully.  And on others, days like today, Anderson is a vicious-minded twat who is about to make John lose his temper despite his own best efforts.  
  
John quite likes most of the Yard.  They're trained professionals, like he is.  Sherlock seems distantly to appreciate that John likes them, for John's affability makes it that little bit easier for Sherlock to get things he wants and have things his way, both of which are very high on the detective's list of essentials.  For instance, on one occasion when Sherlock had just told a fresh-faced D. I. called Hopkins that he had the retentive memory of a goldfish who'd been dropped on the floor, John was able to obtain D. I. Hopkins' crime scene photos anyhow.  As for the more familiar faces, they're just that, and sometimes a bit more.  Sally Donovan once stood with John waiting for Lestrade on a frigid street corner whistling in harmony to The Kinks.  Sherlock had arrived first and sighed tragically, but that's the sort of thing he does when John expresses the desire to see a film, for instance, so John let it pass.   
  
And of course, D. I. Geoff Lestrade is a very decent man.  John knows such things upon first meeting people.  Lestrade is really quite lovely, in fact.  Even apart from his pleasantly imprecise, husky voice, and his incredible stores of patience, Lestrade seems generally to want what's best for Sherlock, and not just for the case.  It goes a very long way towards endearing him to John, that.  Lestrade's hope that Sherlock Holmes succeeds along with the Yard.  
  
Then there's Anderson.  
  
The team of police and the pair of Not-Amateurs are staring hard at a body which has been hung from a chandelier in a very seedy hotel.  Anderson has concluded, and John along with the unholy sod, that the man was drowned before being strung up.  His neck features abrasions, certainly, but superficial ones--and he wouldn't have water in his lungs from a stay in a shite hotel room.  John knows that Sherlock could probably have worked this all out for himself, but Sherlock always defers to medical experts because he isn't a doctor.  Sherlock respects expertise.  
  
Sherlock does not respect Anderson, and the feeling is mutual.  
  
"Obviously, it was the victim who originally engaged the room," Sherlock says to no one at all, except perhaps John.  And Lestrade is allowed to eavesdrop, of course, theoretically.  
  
"How d'you figure?" Lestrade wonders, nodding for the techs to cut the body down.  "We don't have an ID on him, no wallet, and reception says the room was booked by a John Smith, of all the tossers you hate to come across at a crime scene."  
  
"From the shoes in the closet.  Parisian, just like the ones he's wearing, and identical size.  I'm sure you'll find his prints everywhere."  
  
"And you're supposing the murderer just...returned him home and made us a little diorama?  That's mad."  
  
"No, it only seems so, there must be a reason for the drowning before stringing up.  God it's fantastic, I've never seen anything of the kind."  
  
"Will you listen to him?" Anderson sneers softly to a departing medical tech.  "A kid at the bloody circus.  No decency at all.  If it was his own mother, he'd offer to do the autopsy himself.  Probably load up on pictures of her guts for the family album."  
  
Sherlock hears him, but Sherlock stopped speaking to Anderson eleven days ago when Anderson called him a twisted fuck, and Sherlock asked Anderson whether he knew his wife was shagging her psychiatrist.  And relations are still steadily deteriorating.  John, meanwhile, knows that Anderson could not be more wrong.  Sherlock is nothing if not violently tetchy on the subject of his mother.  And that is why Sherlock isn't responding, he knows.  Sherlock is not a safe man, but he's a very cautious one, and John can't think of any way for Anderson to find himself dead in an alleyway faster than to keep on the subject of the Holmes matron.  
  
"She must be a headcase herself, come to think of it," Anderson continues.  "If the freak's mother isn't mental, institutionalized mental, I'll buy the whole force a pint."  
  
Instead of taking the bait, Sherlock dives down to the corpse with a needle he stole from god only knows what technician and stabs it into the dead man's lung, extracting a sample of the fluid.   
  
"God, he's genuinely mentally ill," Anderson mocks.  He glances at John.  "Must be heaven to live with.  Does he demand tissue samples in lieu of rent money?  A pound of flesh?  You've left that part off the blog, I suppose."  
  
This is a bit too close to home for John's liking, which he admits to himself when he later reflects on the afternoon.  Anderson shouldn't be able to wind him up, he knows.  Anderson is an idiot.  But Sherlock is...not usual.  The needle in Sherlock's hand comes out of the body rather more viciously than it went in, which isn't simple to accomplish.  But Sherlock still doesn't say anything.  He doesn't even look at Anderson.  John crosses his arms, sympathetically enraged, telling himself to wait five bloody minutes and it'll all be over.  
  
"Hey, easy on the remains if you don't mind, Sherlock," Lestrade huffs when he turns back and notices what his favorite oracle is doing.  "We _can_ do lab work and text it to you, you know."  
  
"Can you?" Sherlock muses, not caring in the slightest.  
  
"Bet your life."  
  
"Not today, thanks."  
  
Carefully pressing a drop from the syringe onto his disposable glove, Sherlock brings the moisture to his nose.  
  
"Thames water, though I'll have to confirm it," he says happily.  
  
"Jesus, it's like a pederast outside a primary school," Anderson scoffs to John.  "How can you bear it?  We might as well be watching him have a wank."  
  
"For the record, I enjoy watching him have a wank just as much," John snaps, finally losing the reins.  
  
The heads of four med techs swivel.  Lestrade covers what looked like the start of a highly satisfied smile with a cough into his sleeve.  Sherlock remains entirely still, and in the back of his mind John wonders why.  But he's still too furious to bother asking.  
  
Anderson, meanwhile, seems to realize that he's the one making the scene.  
  
"Right," he says nastily.  "Well, I had the wrong end, then.  No offense."  He holds out his hand.  
  
"I'm not shaking hands with you."  
  
"But," Anderson stammers.  "Oh, come off it, I was only taking the piss.  Why not?"  
  
"Because Sherlock doesn't like having his things touched," John growls, exiting the room as fast as he can.  
  
Out in the farther distant hall, everything is quiet and too gaudily patterned.  It's better here.  In the hall, he can't hear the med techs.  In the hall, he can't see Sherlock's reaction to this little drama, which is likely enough to be no reaction at all.  It's difficult for Sherlock to notice anything, really _notice_ it, when his mind is on a case.  John's leg twinges, the imaginary ailment, and he drives a fist into it.  He wants to punch the evil smirk off Anderson's face, wants to bloody him for the childish, cruel taunting that shouldn't matter either to him or to Sherlock.  John's not ashamed of what he said, but he's aware he can't see Anderson twice today without embarrassing himself, without actually losing his temper.  He was hurting Sherlock deliberately, and John knows Sherlock can be hurt far more easily than anyone thinks.  John will stay in the hall, therefore, and hope Sherlock remembers to fetch him.  But he can't clap eyes on Anderson again.  The man was begging for a broken jaw.  
  
Sherlock appears five minutes later, sweeping down the hallway.  He's expressionless.  It could mean anything.  John passes a tongue over his lower lip, tentative.  
  
"This way," Sherlock says, brushing past him.  
  
They don't exit the building by another route, as John supposes they mean to do.  Sherlock stops abruptly, examining several doors.  They all look the same to John.  Then Sherlock pulls a Swiss army knife from his pocket and kneels in front of one.  
  
"You're breaking in?" John asks.  He doesn't get an answer, because the answer is too obvious.  "Is this...part of the case?  What, you've.  You've found something?"  
  
"It's nothing to do with the case.  Quiet for a moment."  
  
And it only takes a moment.  When Sherlock has the door open, he pushes John through it before following himself.  Then he wheels about with the DO NOT DISTURB card and pops it on the outer handle, locking it with a loud _click_.  Sherlock turns back round and takes three paces towards John, one hand tucking into his hip appraisingly.  The difference between Sherlock two seconds ago and Sherlock now cannot be underestimated.  His eyes are magnifying everything before them a billion times, and his lips are parted, and his blood is throbbing in his slender neck.  
  
In fact, he's already gone practically supernova, which is perhaps a bad sign.  
  
 _There he is,_ John thinks.   
  
Sherlock is back.  And he's so beautiful.  John can't be bothered to come up with poetry about it other than _beautiful_.  He might write a blog, but he isn't the sort of man to carry on about dove-white skin and ludicrously brilliant eyes and the ever so slight tilt to Sherlock's torso which all combine to make Sherlock the completely unpredictable thing John nevertheless relies upon for an anchor.  He doesn't compare him in his head to a summer's day, because Sherlock isn't the least bit temperate.  He doesn't compare him to anything.  He can't.  He's a plain man, and Sherlock is incomparable.  
  
"You're well and truly obsessed with me, aren't you?" Sherlock asks.  
  
For a moment, John is taken aback.  He expected any number of things, but never to be mocked.  Not for loyalty.  Sherlock doesn't understand empathy very well, but he does understand loyalty.  For a moment, John is not merely taken aback.  He is badly hurt.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You heard me."  Sherlock advances.  He'll pounce any moment, and then John won't even be able to pretend his will is his own.  "You're obsessed.  'Sherlock doesn't like having his things touched?'  If that isn't proof, I don't know what is."  
  
Sherlock isn't mocking him, John realizes next.   
  
He quoting facts.  Rather breathily.   
  
And just after that, John makes three simultaneous discoveries.  
  
First, this is a game, because this is what Sherlock looks like when a game is on.  Maybe it's even a marvelous game, a game where truth masquerades as foreplay.  The sort of game only Sherlock could come up with, because only Sherlock refuses to say tender things unless the moon is bloody blue or the sky has turned into one giant rainbow.  Second, this is a game two can play.  Third, this is a game Sherlock wants him to join.  
  
So of course, nerves thrilling, John does.  
  
"Must have been watching me pretty closely all this time to notice such a thing," John answers calmly.  "In fact, is there ever a time when you're _not_ watching me?  You watch me in your sodding _sleep._   One might think you fairly preoccupied yourself, mate."  
  
Smirking, Sherlock reaches out with two hands and tugs John into his body by the shirt collar.  John begins to breathe a bit harder.  Everything gets a bit harder.  God, _everything._ And not just a bit.  Did they _make_ Sherlock Holmes out of pure sex drive?  His friend's thigh nudges just a bit further in, and John presses his palms against his waist.  
  
"You _worship_ me," Sherlock whispers half an inch from John's lips.   
  
"Uh, hey, I'm not the one hung up on tonsils here."  
  
"I'm all you think about.  Admit it."  
  
"If you could take your eyes off me for a fucking second, I'd say you have a point."  
  
"I'm your hero.  I'm John Watson's bloody heroic ideal."  
  
"Beg pardon, but you didn't even believe in heroes before you met me.  I proved to you they exist."  
  
"I _own_ you."  
  
"Bit like owning a scuba tank underwater, though, isn't it?"  
  
"I've never seen someone so besotted in all my life."  
  
"Brilliant.  Because neither have I."  
  
This kiss is nothing like the night previous.  Oh, no.  This kiss is like being in the path of a Molotov cocktail.  The detective's lips are already burning.  He's already dropped the collar ends and twisted his fists into John's shirt at the back.  There is already a trickle of something like fuel oil running down John's spine.  His skin is already burning.  Their hips are already pressing together meaningfully.  _I should have expected to get laid for insulting Anderson,_ John thinks, and then, _Did he kiss everyone like this, or only me?_ and then, _His heart is racing, I can feel it in his throat.  This is too dangerous already and it hasn't even started yet._  
  
 _Good,_ John thinks next, taking Sherlock's tongue a bit deeper.  
  
Sherlock pulls away, looking down.  The expression is impossible to relate to anyone who has never seen a wolf staring down another wolf in complete snowy silence.  John saw that once, on some educational program, or he wouldn't have recognized it.  
  
"You'd let me do anything I liked to you," Sherlock observes.  "You _want_ me to do anything I like to you."  
  
"Haven't we sorted that yet?  Anyhow.  The things you'd like to do to me are the things I want from you."  
  
"You don't know that."  
  
"I do."  
  
"You can't know that, it's impossible."  
  
"Wrong."  
  
"How so?"  
  
"If you think I've never seen your face when I come, your status as a genius is hereby revoked."  
  
It doesn't take very long after that for clothing to be flying about as if John is sharing a room with a small hurricane, which isn't far from the truth.  It doesn't take very long for Sherlock's madly shelflike cheekbones to flush slightly, and his grip on John's hair to tighten to just short of pain as he does his utmost by way of kissing to live deep inside his mouth, which also isn't really a metaphor.  It's all fast, and it's all frenetic, and it's all furious, and it's all fine.  It's wonderful.  It's the only thing John has ever experienced which makes him feel truly better than himself.  John likes John just fine, but John needs more than that.  On occasion fighting the Taliban, he knew that being shot at was a nobler cause than the hundreds of other causes his old friends and acquaintances and people-he-liked and people-he-didn't-like were pursuing.  Saving the lives of brave soldiers was better than trying to get rich, or trying to get a promotion, or trying to get laid, or trying to own a house.  
  
But trying to live in the tidal flood of Sherlock Holmes is better still, John thinks by the time he's on his knees on the unfashionable carpet and Sherlock is behind him, still impossibly tall even though he's also kneeling, taking him at the identical moment he pushes several of his perfectly lovely fingers into John's throat.  
  
John wonders, as he struggles to breathe, why he only wants more and deeper of both.  
  
"You adore me," the lips at his ear tell him.  The fingers slide out of his mouth just enough for him to talk, and no further.  "You'd die for me.  You tried once."  
  
"And you spent the next hour hyperventilating," John gasps.  "It was slightly pathetic.  You need me.  Admit it.  You _need_ me."  
  
"You told me to run."  
  
"And you called me a pacemaker."  
  
Either this satisfies Sherlock, or fucking John's throat with his fingers while he fucks him in earnest suddenly takes precedence.  It ought to be over quickly, when one considers how it started, but it isn't over quickly.  John supposes that's because Sherlock is being a genius and making it last.  And by the end of it John supposes, with Sherlock's arm around his waist and half a white hand down his throat, that if Sherlock ever comes to his senses, it will probably be the death of him.  
  
 _If Sherlock isn't the death of me anyway,_ John thinks when the hand wrapped round his pelvis reaches lower, and he is unwound.  
  
After, they actually make use of the bed.  Sherlock's arm is slung low over John's back, and John lies with his head on his friend's chest, listening to a very strange heart beating as if it's perfectly normal.  That's comforting, somehow.  
  
"You love me," John says, better than half convinced of it.  
  
"You love me too," the madman beneath him says smugly.  
  
"So you solved the case?"  
  
"Why do you say so?"  
  
"Well, if you hadn't, then..."  John is confused.  "Sherlock, you did solve it just now, didn't you?"  
  
"No," Sherlock yawns.  "But I will.  His name is Blessington, the dead man, I'll sort it within six hours, this is actually a cold case."  
  
"No, but.  Stop.  Wait.  You took a break in the middle of a case to have sex with me?"  
  
John cranes his neck up in Sherlock's direction, and Sherlock gives him a lazy smile that makes John feel like a bona fide genius.  He isn't one, he knows.  But sometimes Sherlock glows so brightly that John begins to feel like a sort of prism.  A conductor of light.  It's light years beyond being alone, and it's a hundred times better than living through a firefight.  John is a superconductor.  John is a battery.  John is the world's most willing magnifying lens.  
  
"Was it worth it?" he asks.  
  
"Idiot," Sherlock sighs.  
  
Sherlock solves the Blessington case six hours after they leave the stolen hotel room.  And the following week, Sherlock disappears for two entire days.

 

 

 

First of all, before he disappeared, let it be said that Sherlock was bored.  And that is always dangerous.  At the beginning, he toyed about with the formatting of _The Science of Deduction._   Then he marshaled his resources and actually organized some case files.  That was on Wednesday.  
  
By Friday, John thought that Sherlock might possibly be losing his mind.  
  
For three hours, Sherlock was playing the saddest Bach that a violin had ever produced, and John stayed around, because it might have worried him but it was also rather beautiful.  But then Sherlock started to play something else.  It was a floating tone and then a drop, as if someone was falling over a waterfall.  Over and over and over again.  Just that steady, sad sound and then the descent over a cliffside.  After twenty minutes, it was maddening, and after an hour it was completely intolerable.  So John left the flat and went to the pub for a pint, letting Sherlock have his mad noises and his aching minor chords.   
  
That was an hour ago, so John concludes that Baker Street is probably safe for human ears once more.  But when he gets back, Sherlock is nowhere to be found.  
  
At first, John refuses to worry about it.  Perhaps Sherlock was called to the Yard, though it's unlikely he'd go without texting John with instructions to follow after.  Perhaps he went for a walk.  Perhaps his equally mad brother arrived to annoy him and Sherlock fled.  Perhaps, and this would be a miracle, he went to the corner shop because they're out of eggs.  
  
Pulling out his phone, John texts:  
  
 _where've you got to?  
  
JW_  
  
And he waits for an answer, very decidedly not worrying.  
  
John is able to follow his own injunction not to worry about a grown and frankly deadly man for five hours before texting Lestrade.  
  
 _is sherlock running amok with you?  
  
JW_  
  
His phone chirps about thirty seconds later, even though by this time it's almost midnight.  
  
 _Not seen him in days.  Problem?_  
  
Thinking it over, John decides to ask Mrs. Hudson first.  He ducks out their front door and hastens down the stairs.  It might not be a grand idea to knock Mrs. Hudson up at this hour, but she's suffered worse and maybe Sherlock is just having a cuppa with her.  They've clearly known each other for years, after all.  
  
Mrs. Hudson opens the door in a slightly fuzzy dressing gown, looking slightly fuzzy about the eyes and hair.  The herbal soothers, John thinks, have made an appearance tonight.  She smiles readily at John.  
  
"Everything all right, dear?  There's a man on the telly claiming he can communicate with the ghosts of dead pets.  Stuff and nonsense probably, but it makes the people so happy.  Is there anything in it, do you think?"  
  
"I couldn't say, but it's probably a scam.  Mrs. Hudson, have you seen Sherlock?"  
  
Her lips purse.  "Well, no, I haven't, dear.  Are the pair of you in a tiff again?"  
  
"I, um.  Didn't think so.  No.  Not that he bothered to share with me."  
  
"Good.  He's a sweet boy, Sherlock, but the temper on him...you're really an angel, you know.  Did you try his mobile?"  
  
"Yep.  Texted him."  
  
"Oh, my.  Do you want to come in?  I've a fresh kettle on, and we could puzzle it out together."  
  
John follows Mrs. Hudson into her cozy set of rooms, with its friendly portraits on the walls, and the lingering smell of the lavender she freshens her linens with.  He takes a seat at her kitchen table, half-listening to the man on the telly in the parlour, who is talking with a deceased cat.  There's a cup of Darjeeling in front of him seconds later.  
  
"Just this once," Mrs. Hudson says sweetly regarding the tea, like she always does.  "Now, let's find that man of yours.  Where could he be?  We'll think of it, between us."  
  
But they don't.  And Mrs. Hudson, as worried as she is, retires at three.  John leaves the set of flats to pace electrically lit Baker Street, trying to ignore the fiercely protective ache in his chest.  Sherlock is unmistakably tall, and as he rounds every corner John expects to see him sweeping along, having gotten the cracked idea of documenting every individual brick on their block, or reading all the graffiti he can find so as to take his mind off doing nothing, or maybe chatting up the homeless on the subject of unsolved crimes.  Sherlock could really be doing anything, because Sherlock is insane.  But John doesn't see him.  It's a mild night, and it ought to be pleasant to walk through Westminster, but none of the tailored suit jackets are quite slim and expensive and form-fitting enough, and none of the strides quite sufficiently catlike, and none of the bobbing heads unruly and black in quite the right way.  
  
Sherlock is nowhere to be found.  So John keeps walking.  
  
 _you're frightening me. where  
are you, you cow?  
  
JW_  
  
At dawn, when his legs are tired and his eyes watery with fatigue, John buys a coffee.  
  
 _didn't mean to call you a  
cow. say something, you  
complete sod.  
  
JW_  
  
John manages to wait until he returns to the flat to contact Mycroft, which is for several reasons.  First, however mad Sherlock is, Mycroft is madder.  Second, when he discovers that John contacted Mycroft, Sherlock will throw a wobbly the likes of which hasn't been witnessed since Ancient Rome.  There will be flouncing, and scoffing, and gravity-defying acts of plutonium-grade petulance on the settee, and the wild tugging of dressing gown lapels, and acrobatic thrashing ending with his face in a pillow, the sort of sulk which could peel their wallpaper.  But after a sleepless night and ten additional texts between himself and an increasingly anxious Lestrade, John caves and texts The Brother.  
  
 _haven't seen Sherlock since  
7 last night. any ideas?_  
  
 _JW_  
  
John waits for exactly ten seconds.  
  
 _On my way.  
  
MH_  
  
Mycroft Holmes is in their flat twelve minutes later.  He doesn't knock.  Mycroft never knocks, and when he opens their door, somehow John never hears him.  Mycroft just materializes out of thin air with the aid of his magic umbrella.  As unnerving as Sherlock is, his brother wins hands down, every time, no question.  He's like something out of Harry Potter, appearing and disappearing as he does, and the umbrella is probably a disguised wand.  John is sitting at the table with his fist against his chin, admitting to himself that he's now gone over from being Very Worried to being Worried Half to Death.  It doesn't help that Mycroft's smirk is so noticeably dampened.  
  
"Ah, John," Mycroft says in that approximately-pleasant-but-not-actually-warm way of his, without bothering to look at John.  He's examining their flat, in fact.  _Good,_ John thinks.  If anyone can find Sherlock Holmes, it's Mycroft Holmes.  "Glad to see you've reduced your clinic schedule, Sherlock does so like a captive audience for his little victories."  
  
John doesn't bother asking how Mycroft knew that.  "It's been over twelve hours.  I can't--has he done this before?"  
  
"Disappeared?"  Mycroft turns back to John, pulling his index finger and thumb across his lips delicately.  "Well.  Depending upon what _this_ turns out to be, perhaps yes.  I would not rule it out just yet.  And then again, perhaps no."  
  
"Sod it all, are we to worry that he might have been kidnapped by vigilantes?  Attacked by thugs?  Spirited away?"  
  
"Oh, I _always_ worry about those things, Doctor," Mycroft sighs, smiling sadly.  "It is my natural state, as I have mentioned to you.  Pity, because it isn't entirely comfortable.  When last you saw Sherlock, he was in a state of existential ennui, I take it."   
  
"You--what, deduced that?"  
  
"The state of your Union Jack pillow really could not be more telling.  And he hasn't put his violin bow back in the case."  
  
Mycroft's phone buzzes mildly.  He pulls it out of his grey suit jacket's inner pocket.  The Holmes brothers couldn't be better dressed if they were paid for it, John thinks.  Mycroft reads the message, frowning.  
  
"Sherlock did not exit your flat by conventional means."  
  
"How do you know?"  
  
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, John.  It's really nothing to--"  
  
"Is there a camera trained on our front door?"  
  
"Don't limit your imagination so, John, it's uncharacteristic of you.  Neither did Sherlock exit through the back or via the roof.  Puzzling.  You _have_ searched the flat itself, I suppose?"  
  
"Of course I did.  Every room, twice.  Not the cupboard, but Sherlock wouldn't _fit_ in the cupboard."  
  
Mycroft smiles indulgently at John's snappish tone.  "An admirable display of logic, and one which doubtless saved you immense time.  Nevertheless, I am going to take the liberty of very thoroughly searching your flat again, including this cupboard you speak of.  Follow me if you like,  but I won't be a moment."  
  
John texts Lestrade again rather than following Mycroft.  When Mycroft returns, he sits opposite John and crosses his legs elegantly.  He checks the time on his wristwatch, which he does very frequently.  He frowns.  
  
"Useful, was that?" John wants to know.  
  
"Sherlock is not here."  
  
"I know he's not.  That's the problem.  What, you thought he'd be under the bed, having a bloody picnic?"  
  
"John, when it comes to my brother, I think that you will agree that one is always rewarded for ruling nothing out prematurely.  So.  Sherlock was not entirely well, but your domestic accord hadn't yet been threatened, he did not actively desire to worry you, he'd no intention of being gone for longer than an hour or two, he was not coerced into departing, he left by one of three means possible without being detected by surveillance, and now he is missing."  
  
"You know all that from our flat?"  
  
Mycroft's mouth ticks up, but it's the most resigned smile imaginable.  It's not a smile at all, really.  It's an imitation of one.  His phone goes off again, and he raises it to his ear.  
  
"Yes?  I see.  Very well, thank you."  Mycroft returns the phone to his pocket.  
  
"Anything helpful?"  
  
"On the contrary.  He's turned off his mobile."  
  
"Sherlock never turns off his mobile.  Ever."  
  
"I am aware of the fact."  
  
"You know him pretty well, don't you," John remarks.  "Despite his sort of.  Well.  His--"  
  
"Healthy antagonism?  Yes."  
  
"So are we worried about him?"  
  
"We are worried about him," Mycroft agrees.  "Constantly."  
  
Mycroft gets into a very expensive black car twenty minutes later, assuring John that he will do all he can.  John doesn't know what to make of this, but he assumes that it means the entire British Government is now looking for Sherlock, and that's pretty satisfying.  John, meanwhile, heads to the Yard.  Lestrade readily informs him that Sherlock's name and description have been circulated throughout the force, and everyone is keeping a watchful eye out.  
  
"Didn't much need the description bit, did we?" Sally Donovan says dryly.  "Every last plod in London would know Sherlock Holmes with their eyes closed.  Just from the sudden smell of disdain."  
  
"I'm not in the mood for Sherlock jokes.  Quit dossing and get out there and find him," John growls.  "He could be in serious trouble."  
  
Donovan's face twists sympathetically.  She likes John, as much as Sherlock drives her round the twist.  "Yeah, but if he's in serious trouble, he's _giving_ serious trouble.  Don't worry."  
  
But John does worry.  He's so worried he can hardly remember to eat, and sleeping is out of the question obviously, everything apart from looking for Sherlock is out of the question.  He goes to every restaurant he can remember ever frequenting with Sherlock, asks the proprietors if they've seen him, and is disappointed at every turn.  He goes back to the flat to check, but Sherlock isn't there.  Hours pass searching in what John hopes is a systematic fashion, but he can't be sure because Sherlock isn't present to ask.  John stops for another coffee, and it burns in his empty stomach.  He pays a homeless woman fifty quid to find Sherlock and tells her there's a five hundred quid reward.  Sherlock has the money, even if John doesn't.  
  
John texts Mycroft at five the next morning after not sleeping all night, busy appealing to readers of both his and Sherlock's websites.  
  
 _anything?_  
  
 _JW_  
  
He receives the following reply:  
  
 _Neither good news nor  
bad.  Which worries me.  
  
MH_  
  
John winces.  He enters Sherlock's number, hoping against hope it's been turned on again.  
  
 _you can't do this to me. I  
need to know where you  
are. are you all right? can  
you tell me what's happened?  
please. get me a message,  
use the genius for something  
useful, for god's sake.  
  
JW_  
  
John is sitting in Sherlock's chair thinking furiously _there hasn't been a ransom note, there hasn't been a ransom note_ when he finally falls asleep.  It's a decision his body makes, and not his mind.  He awakens at around four in the afternoon when his mobile vibrates.  Startling, furious at himself for losing consciousness even though he wasn't really accomplishing anything anyhow, he whips it out of his pocket.  
  
 _I got lost._  
  
 _SH_  
  
It's the single most terrifying three words John has ever seen.  
  
In a near panic now, John replies.  
  
 _where are you? what  
does it look like? are  
you hurt? alone?  
  
JW_  
  
Pacing, John stares at the mobile in his hand, hardly blinking.  He doesn't stop looking at it for the seven minutes it takes for Sherlock to respond to him.  
  
 _Small room, smells of  
mould. Off the map.  
Alone.  
  
SH_  
  
"Fuck!" John snaps, throwing himself back into the armchair.  
  
Then he starts thinking.  
  
Mould.  Sherlock did not leave the flat by conventional means.  Sherlock did not intend to be gone more than a few hours.  Sherlock never meant to worry him.  
  
 _Mould._  
  
Catapulting out of his chair, John gets the spare key set Mrs. Hudson gave him for emergencies out of the drawer and races down the stairs two at a time, his heart pounding in his throat.  
  
John unlocks the door of 221C, calling _Sherlock_ repeatedly, no longer caring how desperate he sounds.  And he sounds bloody awful.  The flat reeks of emptiness, hints of damp and decay clinging to the edges, and it's a dreadful place, really, John thinks, this dungeon where they found the pair of trainers.  It's terrible here.  The only noise in the wet stillness is the racket John's making trying to locate his friend.  John stumbles into the main room.  
  
And there Sherlock is, propped against a mould stain in the wall, sitting on the dank carpeting with one knee a bit akimbo and both his legs out.  
  
He doesn't look right.  He's a haggard mess, actually, pale and thin-skinned as tissue paper.  All his strings are cut.  His eyes have gone almost transparent.  When they drift up to John, they squint slightly.  Maybe they register John rushing towards him, John landing with each knee astride Sherlock's legs, John's hands on his face, frantically touching him.  But John literally can't tell, because Sherlock is frowning as if something is very wrong.  
  
"All right, what's happened to you?" John demands.  "Are you hurt, _where_ are you hurt?"  
  
Sherlock doesn't say anything.  
  
John remembers the text.  
  
"Sherlock, it's me.  It's John.  What's happened to you?  What did you mean, _lost_?"  
  
Sherlock's lips tighten worriedly.  "Why have you painted yourself clear?"  
  
 _Jesus Christ_ , John thinks.   
  
His heart is hammering and his brain is very still and his hands are solid as skyscraper foundations.  
  
"I haven't," he says slowly.  "That's not even--it's impossible.  Can't you see me?"  
  
"You don't look like yourself," Sherlock whispers.  He temples his fingers in front of his lips.  He has to tuck them up between John's forearms to do it.  
  
"It's John."  
  
"I know it's John, I can see your name."  
  
"You what?"  
  
Shaking his head, Sherlock sighs miserably.  "It happens at crime scenes sometimes, in my head.  White words.  I don't mind at crime scenes, it helps me shut out the other colours and focus, but you're--I don't need that with you.  Why did you change, why do you look like that?  All white and lowercase, _j-o-h-n._ "  
  
John doesn't know if Sherlock could dream up a way of scaring him senseless more quickly even if he'd tried.  And just when John was beginning to think he knew what the inside of Sherlock's head looked like, too.  His fingers slide from the detective's face down to the pulse in his neck.  It's racing nervously, but quite steady.  His pupils, though.  His pupils are too small for the light in this room.  
  
 _What in bloody fuck._  
  
"You've no idea where you are, do you?" John asks.  "Or how long you've been here.  It's been _days,_ Sherlock.  Where are you right now?"  
  
"Shut up," Sherlock says, wincing.  "I can't understand you, you're talking in maths."  
  
"Maths?"  
  
"You're buzzing like a fridge.  Please stop.  It's like a detuned radio."  
  
That rings a bell, but John can't think why for a moment.  He knows that English frustrates the hell out of his friend, that Sherlock believes at times that words are hardly worth speaking if no one understands you after you've said them.  But the exact phrasing of this is...peculiar.  Familiar.  For some reason, it reminds him of the music Sherlock was playing when he disappeared.  A sad keening note and then a sharp dying fall.  Over and over and over and over again.  When he thinks of the pattern, other sounds creep back into John's memory.  A high, chiming, distorted, electric sort of noise and a man with a sweet, sad voice.  A man saying that for a minute, he'd lost himself.  Lost himself.  _I got lost._ Bloody _hell._  
  
"Sherlock," John says, well and truly panicking by now, "those are Radiohead lyrics."  
  
"Fifty-nine hours."  
  
"What?"  
  
"In my head.  It's been playing for fifty-nine hours now, I can't make it stop."  
  
Sherlock has both his shirtsleeves rolled.  That's hardly unusual, but the left one was rolled higher and then just barely tugged back.  John grabs his elbow and tears his sleeve up.  There's a dried pinprick of blood on his forearm.  It isn't the first, either, but John knew that already.  
  
"What the fuck did you take?" he snaps.  
  
"I don't know exactly."  
  
"You don't _know_?  You've gone completely mental, and you don't _know_?"  
  
Sherlock's palm searches for something behind his back.  It comes back with a disposable hypodermic syringe and John's own blood goes even colder.  "I think this may have something to do with it."  
  
"Right.  I'm calling nine nine nine."  
  
"No," Sherlock gasps, his left hand shooting out and stopping John from pulling out his mobile.  "Please, it's going away, I think.  I sent the text, didn't I?  I texted you, I remembered you, you're a doctor, you--you're my doctor.  There, yes, it says right under your name.  _Doctor._   Don't take me to hospital, Mycroft will have a fit."  
  
"I don't give a flying toss if your brother has a fit, you deserve it, he's already having a fit, what in the name of _fuck_ did you take?  This isn't cocaine, look at your pupils, your--is this morphine?"  
  
"No.  I didn't want...but.  There was...no."  
  
John forces himself to breathe very calmly.  He wants to shake the answer out of the lunatic in front of him, but that isn't going to work.  So he tries another tack.  
  
"What was it like in your head?" he asks quietly.  "Then you'll remember what you tried to do to stop it."  
  
Long black eyelashes flutter shut as the detective drops the syringe again.  He rubs both hands over his face.  It's obvious to John that he hasn't slept all this time, and that could be half of it.  But John is leaving nothing to chance.  "Yes.  Yes, that's.  Yes.  Well, there was..."  
  
"Karma Police playing for almost sixty hours now," John says patiently, marveling at what his life has turned into.  
  
"And the colours were gone, all of them.  I wanted them back, because I couldn't see my violin, and your eyes were blank, it was horrible.  But I know when it's white, the white isn't there really, it's just in my head, so...and it hurt, very badly.  All of it hurt.  I don't know that it's ever hurt like that before.  Only a few times, anyway.  So I mixed up something to fix it, it was chemistry.  Science."  
  
"It was nothing of the sort, you wholesale fucking idiot."  John closes his eyes, forces himself to be stiller.  "So.  Radiohead, colours, head pain...what was for the head pain?"  
  
Sherlock squints.  "Intravenous oxycodone."  
  
"I'm going to kill you," John snaps.  "I'm really going to bloody well kill you.  The song will stop playing then, you know, once I've stove your head in, you utter _bastard_.  What else?"  
  
"The song was just an illusion, so...oh, yes.  Haloperidol.  And.  I wanted the colours back, so.  Yes, I remember, I spiked it with a trace amount of LSD."  
  
It doesn't occur to John to ask Sherlock how he got hold of the pharmacy, just like it doesn't occur to him to wonder how Sherlock broke into the flat.  He knows Sherlock's opinions on Bart's security measures and on Mrs. Hudson's door locks.  So the drugs aren't puzzling.  He'd a hospital at his disposal and he's a chemist.  Besides, John hasn't room in his mind to wonder _how._ The doctor part of John's brain is now fully at war with the bloke part of John's brain, which is also scrapping with the sympathetic part of John's brain.  The first bit wants Sherlock hydrated and unconscious as quick as humanly possible, because an asleep Sherlock will probably rid his system of the drug cocktail faster and with fewer opportunities for complete madness.  The last bit aches for him, because even when he was in hospital with a gash wound in his upper thigh and needed John's blood to stay alive, he didn't look this... _lost._   And the middle bit wants to slap him right in the face for what he's done, how _dare_ he do such a thing, how could he?  
  
"You took an intravenous combination of modified heroin and a strong antipsychotic, and you mixed in a _hallucinogen_?"  
  
"It didn't work."  
  
"You're fucking well right it didn't work.  Have you had any water all this time?"  
  
"Twice, from the taps.  God, I can see everything you're saying," Sherlock whispers.  "Tick-tick-tick-ticker-ticker-tape in a row.  How did you get to this place, how did you find me?  It's not on the map, it's somewhere else.  How did you know what song was playing?"  
  
"Everyone knows that song.  We're going home," John says.  "Get up.  Come with me."  
  
"How do I know if you're real?"  
  
John closes his eyes and counts to ten before answering, because he really is going to kill this man.  For what he's done to himself, to his beautiful mind, for what it does to John to see him like this.  He's so angry he can hardly breathe.  
  
"Ask the white letters."  
  
Sherlock cocks his head and stares at John.  He really can't get any thinner, John thinks.  Not ever any thinner than this.  This is the limit to how thin he is going to allow Sherlock Holmes to get. If Sherlock gets to own him, then the reverse should be true, and John is putting his foot down.  Sherlock makes the Thin White Duke look plump just now.  
  
"They say you're really here."  
  
John holds a hand out, pointedly.  And then Sherlock is up and they are leaving.  Sherlock is too thin, he's too cold, he's a tower of strength drained completely empty.  It could make a grown man cry, this sort of waste, this level of senselessness.  Why should a priceless work of art dash itself against the concrete purposefully?  The whole story is a tragedy.  It could break John's heart if he let it.   
  
But he isn't going to.  
  
When Sherlock sees their flat, it's as if they just crossed a desert and not merely a few yards of hall and a staircase.  So relieved he can barely stand.  John deposits him on his bed, which has for some time been their bed despite the posters of serial killers all over the walls, and goes into the hall to send a twin pair of texts.  
  
 _he's back.  
  
JW_  
  
Mycroft's response takes five seconds:  
  
 _Will call off special forces,  
in that case. Do try not to  
lose him again for a few  
months, we're considerably  
over budget. He's well?  
  
MH_  
  
After texting Mycroft in the affirmative, Lestrade's response to the same message arrives.  
  
 _Tell him to fuck himself. I'm  
shattered, haven't slept in--  
he's all right, is he?_  
  
John says yes.  But he can't be sure yet, so he hastens back into Sherlock's room with some water.  
  
Sherlock has crept into the grey cotton Ennui Uniform with the round-necked t-shirt and is lying on his back staring miserably at the ceiling.  Not looking as if he plans to be sleeping anytime soon.  
  
"Drink this," John says.  
  
He does.  Then he simply goes back to blinking.  He tents his fingers up by his chin and then freezes once more, perfectly still and incredibly awake.  
  
"You need to go to sleep," John says helplessly.  
  
"I'll never fall asleep again," Sherlock whispers.  "It's finally caught up with me.  Like a worm in my brain.  Sleep?  Sleep is for normal people.  I wish to god I could sleep, hell, are you out of your mind?  It's never going to happen.  I've given all I can, and it's not enough.  It's not enough."  
  
John makes two decisions simultaneously.  First, Sherlock is off the Thom Yorke, and for good, though John doesn't know quite how he's going to police progressive pop music.  Second, supposing you have tried fighting fire with water, and with foam, and with explosives, and the fire is still raging, the only thing left to do is to fight fire with fire.  Pursing his lips, John goes to his medical kit and gets a fresh syringe.  He probably will qualify as a madman himself after this, he's well aware of it, but Sherlock is tapping his index fingers together in time with _This is what you get when you mess with us._  
  
"We're performing a surgical extraction," John says.  
  
Sherlock's eyebrows tilt when he registers this.   
  
"Why?  How?"  
  
"Because you're past the help of drugs, and I am a doctor.  Can you _move_ the song?"  
  
Frowning, Sherlock rolls onto his side, bringing his knees up towards his ribs.  He turns his face into the pillow, nuzzling it like an exhausted cat.  "I don't know.  I think so."  
  
"Then put it in your arm."  
  
John sinks the hollow needle into Sherlock's arm, the bad arm, the left arm, the arm he avoids looking at habitually, and extracts about one fluid ounce of blood.  Oddly, as he performs the most insane medical procedure that the mind of man has ever conceived, he doesn't feel he's doing any sort of disservice to actual medical science.  Medical science is about making people well.  John is about making people well too, as it happens.  Talismans are valuable.  Placebos are documented aids to recovery.  Washing hands seemed like superstition once.  Chemotherapy is like magic.  Art can fix minds.  Herbs can do good.  Sherlock is mad.   
  
And there really isn't anything less invasive that remains to be tried, is there?  
  
When the blood is out, Sherlock stares at it, fascinated.  His eyes are turning pearly and have stopped blinking.  John doesn't even have to ask what he's thinking now, which is both a miracle and a curse, probably.  Sherlock can still hear it playing in the hypodermic, from inside the transparent song prison.  
  
Before he can tell himself that it's the act of an asylum inmate, John presses the needle into his own arm and plunges the tiny dose of fresh blood in.  He waits a moment, then pours a little antiseptic onto a cotton ball to clean the two punctures.  
  
"I've turned it off," he says as he lies down next to the only man who has ever made him feel like a savior of anything.  
  
  
  
  
Sherlock is only asleep for four hours before John wakes in the near-darkness to find that he's being watched.  It's almost fully night again, and Sherlock seems very pale.  But he's always pale, and the edge of his mouth twitches in an almost-smile when he sees John's eyes open.  
  
"You're back," John says drowsily.  He's on top of the coverlet and so is Sherlock, and John is still wearing jeans, apparently.  He feels run over by an Underground train.   
  
Sherlock nods.  
  
"I'm going to kill you," John adds with finality.  "Oxycodone?  I'm going to kill you dead."  
  
"Don't do it nicely, then," he whispers.  "I'd rather be awake."  
  
"Fuck off, Sherlock, this actually isn't about what _you_ want, for once in your life."  
  
"I know."  
  
"You're _sick,_ you realize, to say that to me."  
  
"I know."  
  
"You'd deserve it, though, you'd bloody well deserve the worst I could give you."  
  
"I _know._ "  
  
They are silent for ten minutes, listening to the clock.  Sherlock never takes his eyes off John, and somehow that helps John to reach his decision.  It isn't going to be pleasant, and it isn't exactly fair.  Hell, it's dubiously moral and John knows it.  But this can never happen again.  Never.  And slowly, as Sherlock's eyes never never blink and never never leave John's face, John retreats into the quiet part of his head, from where he can manage to attempt this feat.  Miracles aren't really his forte, but he did recently kill an invisible song.  He props up on his elbows and rolls his body into Sherlock's, up flush against him, ready and able to do something impossibly courageous now that he's reached the conclusion that he has no choice.  John never thought of himself as a miracle worker, not even once, but he can _attempt_ the impossible nevertheless.  He's a trained professional at that sort of thing...tilting at windmills.  After all, Afghanistan never went well for any young British soldier in any story that John can recall.  
  
Sherlock's eyes are still on John.  They're burning.  
  
 _But the worst o' your foes is the sun over'ead:  
You must wear your 'elmet for all that is said:  
If 'e finds you uncovered, 'e'll  knock you down dead,  
And you'll die like a fool of a soldier.  
  
Fool, fool, fool of a soldier..._  
  
"Listen to me," John says from above his friend's beautiful, otherworldly face.  The face John can all too easily imagine still and lifeless and carved of wax.  
  
Sherlock nods once more.  So John curls his fists into either side of Sherlock's hair.   
  
_For beauty won't help if your rations is cold,  
Nor love ain't enough for a soldier.  
  
'Nough, 'nough, 'nough for a soldier..._  
  
"I have never told Harry that if she took another drink, I'd go away.  I wouldn't ever do that.  And I'd not do that to you either.  But.  I promise you this much.  If you...take yourself off again.  Disappear.  If you try to _hide_ from me the drugs you're doing, if you go away, if you hole up somewhere secret and I'm left wondering if you're alive...no.  No.  Whether it's two-twenty-one C, or the south of France, or a massage parlour in Hong Kong...it's over."  
  
"You'll kill me?  This again?"  
  
"No, I'll _leave you._   Leave you flat.  Alone.  I'll do it too, I.  I'll rip my own heart out and leave it here, but I'll do it.  You've said I was wired wrong.  I can do.  I _can._   I'll leave you, and it'll kill me, probably.  But you won't get to see any of it happen."  
  
Sherlock is shocked.  
  
John wondered what it looked like from time to time, but now he knows, he doesn't like it.  It looks shattering, like he's just viciously reversed the detective's gravity.  
  
"I'll find you," Sherlock says fiercely.  "I can find you anywhere."  
  
"Not necessarily."  
  
Suddenly John--who thought all this time that his military training was up to snuff--is underneath Sherlock with his hands pinned violently above him against the bed, Sherlock holding his thighs in place with his knees.  The grip Sherlock has on his wrists is extraordinarily careful, brooks absolutely no argument, and in fact makes a very clear point: John isn't going away.  Ever.  John doesn't bother trying to get out of this hold, because he knows he can't.  It would only fuel whatever Sherlock is doing, which is what needs to be defused as quickly as possible.   
  
So John lies very still, watching the man above him act like who he genuinely is.  He ought to be terrified, and the tragedy is that he's _fascinated._  
  
"Just what is it like in that tiny little mind of yours?" Sherlock asks, in the first truly dangerous tone John has ever heard him use when they're alone together.  "Is it nice, having such a childish imagination?  Being able to ignore any inconvenient fact you like, is that _lovely,_ John, is it _comfortable_?  I wonder, you see, because you appear to think that I can be bullied, which is a patently _stupid_ mistake.  You aren't leaving me.  Do you know what would happen if you did?  You would try to hide where you were headed and proceed to make a series of completely juvenile blunders, idiotic mistakes really, because you are ordinary, and then I would hunt you down and take you back, because I am not ordinary, I am _incredible._   And I _own you._   Don't you ever fucking think for a moment that you could just vanish into the ether and leave no trace of yourself, you haven't the means."  
  
 _When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck,  
Don't look nor take 'eed at the man that is struck,  
Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck  
And march to your front like a soldier._  
  
"I can and I do," John says.  
  
"Shut up, it's _impossible_."  
  
"Not if I call your brother."  
  
"You _won't_ call my brother."  
  
"If you hide away again for a drugs binge, I will, watch me."  
  
Sherlock is breathing so hard he's practically hyperventilating, and his eyes have gone utterly feral, like the eyes of a rabid cat.  
  
"I could kill you now, and you'll never get the chance," he points out evenly.  
  
 _If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white_ ,  
 _Remember it's ruin to run from a fight._  
  
"You could," John agrees.  "You could probably have killed me any number of times.  But you aren't going to kill me, Sherlock.  You're going to allow yourself to be bullied just this once, because it's by me, and you aren't going to kill me, you're never going to kill me."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
He sounds desperate.  As if he actually needs to know, which John thinks is altogether heartbreaking.   
  
"You know why already," John says gently.   
  
"Tell me."  
  
He's pleading now.  This question has clearly crossed his mind.  And John wonders how horrible that must be, knowing yourself to be light years above ordinary and a maverick law unto yourself, on the day you realize you might hurt the people you least want to.  John thinks it must be the worst feeling in the world, as if your cancer were contagious or as if you emitted toxic radiation.  He thinks about how _careful_ Sherlock always is, how _precise,_ how very _thoughtful_ , and he loves him for it.  
  
"You could tell me, if you thought about it hard enough."  
  
"I can't.  You don't know what it's like."  
  
"I don't need to know what it's like to know you won't kill me.  If you killed me, you'd never get to see what I was about to do next."  
  
"Oh, thank you," gasps Sherlock.  John wonders if a person can be wound so tightly that when they release some of it, they disintegrate, because that seems to be what his friend is doing as he lets goes of John's wrists and descends into a broken marble heap on top of him.  "I knew you'd tell me why.  That was.  I never meant to...I can't think sometimes, I'm sorry, I--"  
  
"Sherlock, shut up," John orders.   
  
_When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,  
And the women come out to cut up what remains,  
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains  
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier._  
  
He holds the pair of them very still.  It's easy to do, because Sherlock is limp as a rag doll now, just curled into him lifelessly, and because John's hands have never been steadier.  John vaguely recalls that the business of surviving probably shouldn't happen in their bedroom, but he can't care now.  He picked this.  He decided that this was who he'd see through the tempests, and he didn't leave the Army because he turned tail, he left because they no longer had any use for him.  And this is the same.  He'll be useful to Sherlock, and that's the way it is.  No point needlessly philosophizing over it.   
  
Maybe it's crazy, but crazy doesn't matter because John knows when something is good.  And Sherlock is worth every second of it.  
  
"I won't disappear anymore," Sherlock whispers.  "I just--I didn't want you to see."  
  
John feels the white-hot glow of triumph over adversity flooding his chest.  If John had conquered Asia, he wouldn't feel any differently than he feels hearing this statement made by the still shivering chap in his arms.  Compelling Sherlock Holmes to do as he's told is probably more difficult, anyway.  John runs his fingers up and down his friend's back, as if he'd expected to win all along.  It's an amazing sensation, this.  Sherlock Holmes can do anything, and John Watson can tame Sherlock Holmes.  That makes John feel like a king.  Provided Sherlock never comes to his senses, this is actually going to _work._  
  
"What if I don't mean to disappear, though?  What if it's an accident, you can't leave me if it's an accident, can you?  What if I get lost again?"  
  
"If you get lost, I will find you."  John knows he can do it, knows this to be true.  "There is nowhere you could go I wouldn't go after you.  I swear to Christ there isn't."  
  
"What if it's in my head?"  
  
"I'll go in your head."  
  
"How can you be sure?"  
  
"I love you.  I'll figure it out."  
  
"Don't say that now," his friends snaps.  
  
John moves his head to look down, but Sherlock's face is far from visible.  "Bloody hell, Sherlock, is there a _better_ time to say--"  
  
"Stop it, stop it.  Say something nice to me if you must, say anything, just not that, today doesn't deserve it, I'm deleting today except the important parts.  Say something else."  
  
John pauses.  "You're a fucking crime scene," he says with tears in his eyes.  
  
"Right," Sherlock says on a long exhale.  "Right.  And we love crime scenes."  
  
This man will be very hard to live with, John thinks.  He already is, after all.  He is like living with a piranha when you're already bleeding.  John is never going to have any privacy, not even inside his throat where there aren't any tonsils, and now his boyfriend has gone mad enough that they've switched blood, so there really isn't much left, John thinks.  But it's better than nothing ever happening to John again.  So much better, in fact, that he feels as if he never made any conscious choice at all.  John mulls over Sherlock's version of English, wonders what else he would enjoy hearing as much as being called a crime scene.  
  
"You're also a health hazard."  
  
"True."  Sherlock goes very tense all of a sudden.  "But I wouldn't have killed you.  I wouldn't, ever.  I'm sorry.  I was only bullying you, I promise."  
  
"That's a lie, isn't it?"  
  
Sherlock thinks it over.  "No.  It isn't.  I don't believe it is."  
  
That's one of the nicest things John has ever heard.  And that is insane.  John smiles in the dark where no one can see him.  
  
"You do realize, Sherlock, that 'if you leave me, I'll kill you' threats are--"  
  
"More than a bit not good, the exact textbook definition of Not Good."  
  
"And you also realize that we're skipping that part entirely in future."  
  
"I do realize, of course I do, but you frightened me.  I shouldn't have done it, but I couldn't seem to stop myself.  You're probably angry.  I know you're angry, are you angry, but I'll make you like me again.  I'm wonderful at making you like me, I'll make it up to you, I'll do something amazing."   
  
"Yep, you probably will."  
  
"I can do anything.  What would you like first?"  
  
"I'd like you to go back to sleep," John murmurs.  "And try not to do anything cracked while you're unconscious."  
  
For several more hours, they do sleep.  When John awakens for the second time, at around five in the morning, it's because he can feel R-L-O-C-K being written in gentle fingernail on the back of his neck.  It occurs to John, as the H-O-L portion commences just below it, that if Sherlock did this in cursive instead of defiant capitals, perhaps it wouldn't wake John at all.  He considers telling his friend this.  Sherlock won't mind a little constructive criticism, and that way John can sleep.  For about five minutes, as Sherlock traces the letters over, John thinks about the best way to phrase his suggestion.   
  
John doesn't say anything, though.  Just the way he doesn't ever mention seeing through the ludicrously transparent Recycled Bath Water Gambit.  He simply drifts off towards sleep again, a man with an invisible name being tattooed on the back of his neck.  In a drowsy corner of his mind, he knows it is joining the invisible SHERLOCK HOLMES on his forearm, and on his calf, and on his collarbone, and on his pelvis, and on his thigh, and on his hip, and on his left shoulder, and on the other side of his left shoulder, and just above his left shoulder, and on his back where the bullet exited his left shoulder.  Sherlock hasn't ever repeated locations for his imaginary body artwork to date, unless he managed to do it without waking John and John doesn't realize it.   
  
_One day,_ John thinks in Sherlock's general direction, _I'll be entirely covered in your invisible name._  
  
It's a goal, anyway.  It's something to aim for.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The following Tuesday, Sherlock solves a case involving poisoned stationery, a Russian smuggling ring, a love triangle, and a golden pince-nez.  He is glowing like a Harrod's window.  No one on earth has ever burned brighter than this, John is absolutely certain of it.  Sherlock is a magical creature, and he wraps his arms around John's waist in the middle of the street and he spins him in a wild circle.  Under normal circumstances, John would object to being picked up like a tyke and swung round and round where all the motorists in the nearby roundabout can plainly see him, but as usual he forgets to object.  This time, however, when Sherlock reaches the pavement and sets him down, he finally finds the nerve to tell Sherlock what's truly on his mind.  
  
"How long will you be like this?" he asks before he can stop himself.  
  
"Like what?"  
  
John shrugs, his skin prickling with discomfort.  "Like you are.  Obsessed with me--looking at me like that, I just.  When you're looking at me like that...hang it.  It scares me witless, really.  That you'll stop, and I won't...that you'll stop one of these days.  That's all.  I want to _do this,_ to be--I want to be there to help you.  For as long as I can.  I just want to _be there._   With you.  How long am I likely to have as your, um.  Preoccupation?"  
  
Sherlock's eyes narrow.  "Do you really think about that?"  
  
"Every day, more or less," John admits.  
  
The ludicrously brilliant smile creeps steadily onto Sherlock's face.  "John, I was three years old when I first grew obsessed with the sound of the violin, and I solved my first crime when I was seven.  Have I thrown either of those things over?"  
  
"Well...no.  But--"  
  
"It isn't _my_ fault I didn't meet you until that day at Bart's, is it?"  
  
"Of course not, but--"  
  
"You are such an _idiot_ ," Sherlock says lovingly.  
  
It takes another five or six seconds before John realizes he is smiling back at his friend.  And maybe he is an idiot.  He tries to imagine a Sherlock Holmes who doesn't love the violin and doesn't solve crimes.  He can't.  When he tries to imagine a Sherlock Holmes who doesn't care whether or not John has tonsils, he finds to his utter delight that he can't manage to do that either.  Sherlock is out of his mind, and John-sexual, and the rarest, brightest thing on earth.  
  
"I'm an idiot," John agrees.  "But you don't much care, do you?"  
  
"Of course not," Sherlock beams at him.  "Practically everyone is."  
  
"Well," John clears his throat.  "Anything on that list of yours you're keen to try?"  
  
"Which?"  
  
"Either.  I'll veto it if it's too insane."  
  
Sherlock thinks this over with his dark head cocked.  He is very, very pleased with the offer.  John wonders just which options he is currently rejecting in favour of which other options and finds he isn't even put off by the certain fact that half of them are probably _awful._  
  
"May I take all your fingerprints and examine them through my microscope?"  
  
"Yep.  Really, that's all?"  
  
"Then will you ink them again and leave a set on my skin?  Out of sight, I promise."  
  
"Wouldn't you prefer to ink yours and leave them on me?"  
  
"Yes," Sherlock admits, "but possibly that's going too far."  
  
"No, it's all right.  It's disturbingly nice.  But Sherlock...I can tell you're toning it down.  Fingerprints are fine.  What about something else?  Something from your other list?  Tell me."  
  
His friend seems hesitant to oblige.  As if perhaps John will run screaming away if he delves with any honesty into The Other List.  But eventually, Sherlock puts a hand on his lean hip and takes the plunge.  
  
"May I taste your eyes?"  
  
John doesn't wear contact lenses, as his eyesight is very good, so he thinks it over.  The concept is more uncomfortable than it is distasteful in and of itself.  Will he be able to keep them open?  But then he recalls all those days overseas when grit and sand blasted into his corneas, and how meticulous he had to be with wet cloths, and after all Sherlock's tongue is very delicate and very soft and wet and warm.  When it isn't acting like a conquering army.  
  
"Why not," says John amiably.  "It won't be the maddest thing I've ever done.  I invaded Afghanistan, after all."  
  



End file.
